After Reading
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Dr. Bordelon's The Short Story: On Campus |
A reading recommendation. If your brain is titillated by mental games such as Borges, you should run (not walk) to the library and get a copy of Lawrence Weschler's article in the Sept. 1994 Harper's entitled "Inhaling the Spore." In it, he relates the bizarre story of Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology, which houses strange and implausibly real – or is it realistically implausible? – exhibits on flora, fauna, and ephemera. A wild piece of non-fiction (incidentally, guess which 20 th century Argentinean writer he refers to? . . .). Afterward to "The Garden of Forking Paths" From experience, I know it's best to start off thinking about this story by first clarifying its characters. We'll take them one by one. Dr. Yu Tsun: Richard Madden: Vicktor Runeberg: The Chief: Ts'ui Pên : Stephen Albert: The story opens not with the usual exposition setting the scene, but with a reference to Liddell Hart's History of World War I , and then proceeds to republish, in medias rei , what seems to be the confession of captured spy. Footnote two at the bottom of the left-hand column, written by Borges himself, is meant to be read as if it was inserted by the authorities who oversaw Yu's confession. The question, of course, is why open a story so oddly? It's obvious that Borges is trying to blur the lines between his story and reality. Placing the story in the context of a war history (Hart's book exists – published in 1939 [American title The Defense of Britain ]) and setting up the story as if it were a discovered document – complete with annotations – lends the tale an air of authenticity. Even the missing page, accounting for the odd start, makes this seem less an invented fiction than an archival discovery. It's as if a historian rooting around in old military intelligence files has stumbled upon a sheaf of old documents and is merely publishing her find. This convention of a "found document" has a long history (the "Custom House" section of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is good example), but Borges takes it a step further by using the foregrounding of a "real" historical document – Hart's book – to link a fictional text to a non-fictional one. Oddly, this serves a dual purpose: it both provides Borges' invented text, "The Garden of Forking Paths," with a veneer of truth, and paradoxically, the juxtaposition of the two undermines the validity of Hart's History of WWI . Assuming an air of probability, the guise of objectivity assumed by Borges' text contaminates Hart's text, amounting to a guilt by association. The fiction of Borges rubs off on the non-fiction of Hart, causing alert readers (that's us) to wonder "uh. . . which is fiction and which is . . . uh . . . non-fiction?" On a larger scale, this merging/conflation of the real and the fictional calls all texts into account. Just how much of history, the story suggests, is "real?" If it's so easy to construct a fiction that fools people, how can we make such clear distinctions between fiction and non-fiction? Part of this ease lies in language's ambiguity. As noted in the "Before reading" section, Borges enjoyed toying with the fallibility of language: his contention that "All nouns are abbreviations" means that persons, places, or things, which we deem inviolable, are considered by him to be mere metaphoric approximations that only substitute, or stand in for, their referent. Like linguists who separate the signified (the item/thing being discussed) from the signifier (the means of communication), this calls attention to the fallibility of language and any written act. Since it is communicated in writing, any history is flawed, an "abbreviation" of what actually happened. Before dismissing this questioning of reality as mere mental games, consider the example of the Soviet Union. Until recently, their school-children's perspective of history could be considered fiction. To them the purges of Stalin never occurred, nor did any other atrocities associated with the Communist government. To them, America was peopled with only two classes: rich, selfish capitalists, and poor, oppressed proletariats (well . . . not so sure this is fiction). The "history" that was studied, like the history of Yu Tsun and the novel The Garden of Forking Paths , was fiction masquerading as non-fiction. Closer to home, the internet is a perfect example of how something that looks ostensibly "real" can be completely made up. There are numerous sites which deny, with seemingly authentic documentation, the existence of the Holocaust, or affirm, with equally authentic documentation, that the earth is flat. The novel by Ts'ui Pên, The Garden of Forking Paths , is an illustration of this power of language to shape reality. When I write about the short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" – a story which actually exists on a printed page – I use quotation marks to denote that I'm talking about a short work. But when I write about the novel The Garden of Forking Paths – a story which, er . . . . actually exists(?) on a printed page – I need to underline it, just as I would when writing about a real book. This underlining imparts an air of reality to the fictive, imaginary text by Ts'ui Pên, which is included in a fictive, imaginary text by Jorge Luis Borges. Indeed, doesn't the Garden of Forking Paths exist now? Just the fact that I can discuss the plot and structure of the Garden of Forking Paths somehow makes it "real." In effect, Borges turns the act of reading and understanding his story into an illustration of the way reading constructs reality. Yet the story is not merely an examination of the uncertain nature of reality ("Oh no – It's much, much more!!"). As Albert's discussion of the theme of Pên's Garden makes clear, the story is also about time. Again, Borges' concept of time was not linear. Intellectually, things do not occur in a strict cause and effect progression for Borges. As a mental construct, time (like other mental constructs such as writing and history) was mutable. Albert calls Pên's labyrinth, "An invisible labyrinth of time" (¶20), because it contains all possibilities – it has moved beyond the cause and effect prison of time and exists in another dimension. Albert tells Yu "Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts, you are my enemy, in another, my friend" (¶22). Albert, whose face is "immortal" (¶23) (as in outside of time) seems to share Pên's view of time. The Garden of Forking Paths (note the underlining – which means I'm referring to the fictional novel) is an exploration of Pên's conception of time. As Albert recounts, Pên "believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times" (¶29). This is Borges at his most playful. He posits here a parallel universe – actually several – that are created, at least in part, through a work of art: specifically, Pên's labyrinthine novel, The Garden of Forking Paths . What Borges suggests here is that our concept of time does not always hold sway, and, to borrow a phrase from Star Trek , other dimensions exist. Now as he noted in "A New Refutation of Time," he does not necessarily believe in this idea, but delights in posing it as an intellectual game. And while on the one hand this is just a playful teasing with an accepted convention, on the other hand, given Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories of wormholes and black holes, maybe he is on to something here. After all time, as we know it, is just made up and arranged according to our yearly track around the sun: it doesn't really "exist." (I'm using so many "question" quotation marks because, well, Borges constantly calls into question so many ideas that we take for granted.) So while it sounds a bit far-fetched (or if you're in a cranky mood, hokey), Borges' ideas are actually grounded in science. One of the ways this plastic concept of time is illustrated in the story is by the doublings that occur. For instance, Pên was killed by "the hand of a stranger" (¶7); Albert is also killed at the hands of a stranger – by Yu, the grandson of Pên. Both Pên and Albert have retired in solitude – one to create a novel and labyrinth, the other to interpret the novel and labyrinth. Pên's novel is called The Garden of Forking Paths ; Albert's garden is called the Garden of Forking Paths. Yu is Chinese and has committed his life to another country, Germany; Albert is English and has committed his life to another country, China. Several other doublings exist, all suggesting a blurring of time and space. Borges implies that since so many events/coincidence/doublings can occur, the boundaries of time dissolve. Albert, in some ways, has become Pên, and thus his (Albert's) fate will match his mentor's (Pên's). As cited earlier, Borges believed "Do not the fervent readers who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, literally, Shakespeare?" If you substitute Pên for Shakespeare, Borges's logic becomes clear. In a sense, Pên has never died and exists whenever his work is read. This idea of language shaping reality is an old literary conceit: the "this" in the concluding couplet of Shakespeare's sonnet "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day," -- "So long as men can read, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" – is the poem itself. Shakespeare suggests that whenever the poem itself (again, the "this") is read, it reanimates his lover, making her come alive in our minds. This idea of cheating or stepping out of time is consonant with Borges's idea of the power of labyrinths. They represent, as one critic notes, "the image of a chaos ordered by human intelligence, of an apparent and deliberate disorder which contains its own key" (Rodriguez-Monegal 139). For Borges, this "chaos" is the passage of time: by its twists and turns, a labyrinth can somehow, according to Borges, contain or slow time itself. Remember that Pên's labyrinth was supposed to be "An invisible labyrinth of time" and would be "strictly infinite" (¶20). With this in mind, it's apparent that the labyrinth – The Garden of Forking Paths – is a kind of parallel universe created by man to subvert the natural order. Think of it as a Hoover Dam holding back, not the Colorado River, but the ephemeral River of Time. The protagonist of the story, Yu Ts'un, also feels this stretching of time. Yet his character is different than his ancestor Pên, or his ancestor's double, Albert. As he approaches Albert's house, Yu gets lost in the maze of his own thinking, and becomes "an abstract perceiver of the world." Because of this, time slips away: for Yu, "The afternoon was intimate, infinite" (¶7). This reverie, for Borges, means that Yu has stepped out of the temporal world. But Yu can only feel this as a vague, uneasy sensation. In this story, time seems inextricably bound up with the idea of the labyrinth, which for Borges is a symbol of order amid the chaos of the world. Yu's reactions to these sensations are worth a close look – after all, this is his story. While some critics argue (and I feel this way myself in some cases) that Borges's stories are not about character, Yu does have a clear personality and even undergoes an epiphany in the story. Near the end of the story, after Albert has revealed the secret of his great grandfather's labyrinth and novel, Yu gets a "sensation" of other people surrounding him: "Those people were Albert and I, secret, busy, and multiform in other dimensions of time" (¶32). Yet for Yu, unused to such feelings or conceptions, these feelings are a "tenuous nightmare" (¶32). Though exposed to these ideas and apparently genetically predisposed to them through his great grandfather, he remains locked in Newtonian time. Frightened by such a complex nature of time and existence, he rejects such idealistic ideas and, when he returns to the real world, sees a man "as strong as a statue" (¶32), and commits himself to the temporal worlds and its demands. He feels too strongly the need to prove himself to the Chief: though he "cares nothing" for Germany, he "wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies" (¶4). Perhaps because of the shame he had believed his great grandfather brought upon his family name, he felt a need to validate his own worth and kill Albert. Still, his regret for his actions is readily discernable. He states, as if in defense of his actions, that Albert's death was "instantaneous – a lightning stroke" (¶34). The story ends, not on a note of triumph, but on a note of despair: Yu laments that the chief "does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness" (¶35). This sadness stems not only from the murder of Albert, who Yu characterizes as " Goethe " (¶4), but from his realization that the Garden of his ancestor, with the death of Albert and with his own death, will again be considered "senseless" (¶17). The only two people who have successfully interpreted it are now, or will soon be, dead. In the course of one hour, he has both exonerated his great grandfather and doomed him to oblivion, an act which would indeed lead to "contrition and weariness." For some reason, I assume that Albert experiences the same sensations about time, but because he lives with a more expansive definition of time than Yu, they do not bother him. There is even a strong hint that he knows the outcome of Yu's visit; the last words he tells Yu, before Yu shoots him, are "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy" (¶31). Because time has "innumerable futures," Albert believes that what happens in any of the possible futures is insignificant: it will probably be contradicted in different future. In this particular future, Albert, as he seems to know, is Yu's "enemy." Could his passivity be a sign of kinship with Yu? Is Albert saying, in effect "Since I am multiform and exist in several times, I willingly allow you to murder me." Could this be a sacrifice by Albert in honor of Pên? Or since they are doubles, could it figuratively be his grandfather himself making this sacrifice? Or is it even a sacrifice – if they exist in other dimensions, he (they?) is (are) not really killed, right? That's for me to know . . . and you to find out. Afterward to "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" First, it's important to separate the two stories in Tlön – one deals with the narrator, and the other with the world of Tlön. The narrator's story begins during a dinner with Bioy Casares (a real Argentinean writer). It is through his "discovery" of an encyclopedia (5) that we trace the unfolding of the fictional worlds of Uqbar and Tlön. While much of the story reads like a curiously (given the subject) dispassionate report on what has happened, keep in mind that this is a first-person narration and consider how or why the narrator reveals his feelings. Second, lets look at the odd title. Breaking it down into parts helps clarify some of the more mysterious aspects of the story. For starters, there's good old "Tlön." An imaginary world formed by a secret society of writers and thinkers, it was funded by a 19 th century American segregationist, Ezra Buckley. This world is known through A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol XI. Hlaer to Jangr , a volume that fascinated the world when it first appeared in 1937 and its ideas were rapidly disseminated among the general public. "Uqbar" is the name of an imaginary country located somewhere in the Middle East. It is only known through an article inserted into volume XLVI of the Anglo-American Cyclopedia , itself a reprint ("mirror" image? Hmmm. . . . ) of the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica (This is the encyclopedia article mentioned in the first section of the story). Interestingly, the literature of this fictional country "never referred to reality" (5), but referred instead to "two imaginary regions" (5), Tlön and Mlejanas. Finally, "Orbis Tertius" refers to the world of Tlön and the name of the encyclopedia that will be written in one of the languages of Tlön. Like the title, the story itself is divided into three sections which act like a perverse set of those Russian nesting dolls that get smaller and smaller as you take them apart. The difference is the process is reversed: the dolls/ideas go from smaller to larger. In each section a "discovery" (3) of a document (or documents) is made that both gradually sheds more and more light on the mystery of the story, and gradually infects the world with its discourse. In the first section, the article (a short written document) sets up the idea of a fiction world, with its depiction of Uqbar. The size seems to somehow mirror its effect: really only two people are effected, the narrator and Bioy Casares. In the next section, after some background information on who we later find out to be one of the contributors to the Encyclopaedia of Tlön , Herbert Ashe, another book is discovered. This time, instead of an encyclopedia article explaining a fantastic country, a single volume covering Hlaer to Jangr , is revealed. Larger in size, the influence of this book is considerably wider than the article on Uqbar. The narrator looks askance at the tabloidization of the "zoology and topography of Tlön" (8), which points toward a broader cultural influence that has filtered into the general populace, moving discussion of an imaginary world beyond mere scholarly attention to the larger sphere of common knowledge – or common confusion. The ideas embodied in Tlön are elucidated in this section. The main tenet of this imaginary world is based, fittingly, on idealism , a philosophy that exults the life of the mind. Accordingly, the only discipline in Tlön is "psychology" (9). To be honest, I can't say I can follow all the philosophies of Tlön, but the main thrust is, as the narrator mentions over and over again, its emphasis on idealism. Thus, hrönir are mental thoughts made physical. A person thinks about a certain object, and that object appears; conversely, a person doesn't think about an object or forgets about it, and it literally disappears. At this stage, though there is heated interest and even debate about the different ideas in this imaginary world, people still seem to accept it as an imaginary world. In the "Postscript" (the third section), "Orbis Tertius," the distinction between reality and fantasy have been obliterated. The year is 1947, and the "contact and habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world" (18). With the discovery of the entire forty volume set of The Encyclopaedia of Tlön , a new and ideal world, one created wholly by man, insinuates itself into all cultures: this platonic (ideal?) creation of man takes over the real world. The logical progression is now complete: from an article effecting only a few people, to a single volume amusing the larger culture, to an entire set "disintegrating this world," Borges shows how an idea makes it way through a culture. As a measure Tlön's pervasiveness, hrönir begin to appear on earth, first in the form of a compass as a gift to the Princess Faucigny Lucinge (who in real life was an Argentinean married to a French aristocrat), and then in the form of a "conical object (made from a metal which is not of this world)" (17) discovered by the narrator. These two objects, projections of the imaginary world of Tlön, are for Borges symbols of the power of the fantastic and of the mind. Given Borges' interest in idealism, this imaginary world sounds like his kinda' place, but he complicates our appreciation of this world by acknowledging the dangers of such an endeavor. While the people willingly embrace the ideologies of Tlön – as publication of the encyclopedia spread across the earth, the narrator notes that "reality yielded on more than one account" (17) – the narrator compares the acquiescence of the people with the horrific regimes of Nazism . Apparently, our "Blessed rage for order ," is not so blessed after all. This is a typical movement in Borges's fiction. As Naomi Lindstrom notes, "After producing a universe of confusion, this sense of overload, Borges's stories often show, in contrast, the relief the human mind finds in systems of belief and thought" (20-21). Yet these systems "initially welcomed for their patterning effect, may prove equivocal, arbitrary, and inconsistent. In the worst cases, excessive zeal to possess truth, revelations, and solid beliefs destroy certain of Borges's characters" (21). In this case, as it did in Germany and Italy during the 1930s and 1940s, it destroys a whole society. But the story suggests that the problem isn't with the imaginary world, but with the people. As the narrator carefully notes, reality "longed to yield" (17). With this, Borges creates a parable, not only of the fascism of Germany and Italy, but of the nature of man. As Borges' notes, history bears out the truth of this "longing." In times of trouble, people flock toward what seems ideal. When hyper-inflation in Germany meant that you had to literally go to the baker with a wheel-barrow full of money to purchase a loaf of bread because the currency had lost so much value, a short man with an ugly moustache telling you there is another way seems appealing. That his speech is larded with anti-Semitism and is appallingly xenophobic can be easily rationalized against the desire for stability. As the wags like to say, the trains did run on time in Mussolini's Italy. This desire stems, in part, from our belief in authority. Would it have been as effective if the ideals of Tlön had been disseminated through a comic book? Probably not. An encyclopedia, with its connotations of thorough, factual knowledge, lends authority and, well, realism, to the fictional world. Even its weight and heft suggest the concrete, the real, the tangible. It makes a perfect vehicle for someone interested in creating a world destined to supplant the real world. A symbol of objective and learned authority, an encyclopedia's all-encompassing breadth, spanning the history, art, knowledge, etc. of a particular world, lends an air of completion and permanence to whatever it examines – even if, as in The Encyclopedia of Tlön , what it examines is an entirely fictive creation, a figment of many imaginations. But then these reflections are rooted in the real world. As he did in "Garden," Borges blurs the line between fiction and reality by mixing real people and places with fiction. Argentinean readers would find familiar neighborhoods (for example "Laprida Street" [16]) and recognizable figures ("Ezequiel Martinez Estrada" [7, 15] a contemporary of Borges and well-known Argentinean writer and cultural critic). There really was a newspaper in Memphis called The American , and the references throughout to the philosophers David Hume, George Berkley, Baruch Spinoza, like the connotation of an encyclopedia, have a disorienting effect, inserting a gloss of reality that renders its subject, Tlön, all the more real. In a truly idealistic world like Tlön, everything is created in the mind; thus, it is easy to make copies: everyone is a Xerox machine – if you just think about something, you create it. In "Tlön," this corruption is made clear right from the first sentence. The oxymoronic "conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia" (3), sets a tone of unreality to the whole story: the not real (mirror) is reflecting the real (the encyclopedia). But Borges takes it a step further; the Anglo-American Encyclopaedia itself is a plagiarism – a mirroring – of another text, the Encyclopaedia Britannica . Similarly, the article on Uqbar is a mirror image – a written reflection – of another place; Uqbar itself is a kind of mirror image of a place on earth, but here the picture shifts a bit and the distortions become more pronounced. Uqbar is reflected by Tlön, which is reflected in (surprise!) an encyclopedia, which will then be mirrored in another encyclopedia written in Tlönese entitled Orbis Tertius . This dizzying effect – a kind of mental vertigo – is precisely the feeling Borges means to evoke in his readers, and is part of his continuing attraction. Another part of his attraction is the way he anticipated so much of contemporary life. Tlön is a kind of pre-computer virtual world; granted, it's not a game, but its writers, like today's software programmers, are bent on creating a world wholly of their own design. Consider the popularity of computer games which simulate alternative worlds, or cyber communities, or entertainment parks, or even movies like Star Wars or Star Trek . Don't they all point both to the pull of the fantastic and its presence in our society? Aren't the little toy Wookies and Darth Vaders our own hrönir ? Aren't they examples of the ideal intruding into the real? And what about good ole' Walt Disney? He created his own Tlön: go to California, Florida, or even France to see his world – which I find just as frightening as the one created in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Borges knows that we are, at heart, an ill-contented lot, and in our zeal to create and remake our worlds, we are bound to blunder – as he is all too glad to point out. Such blunders occur whenever we ignore rich fabric of our daily lives in a headlong pursuit of alternate realities (television, the internet, vacations in Cancun, and (gulp!) fiction) that seductively winks and draws us in. Works Cited Lindstrom, Naomi. Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Print. Rodriguez-Monegal, Emir. "Symbols in Borges' Work." Jorge Luis Borges. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 133-148. Print. What the author/critics say: For Borges "The world is a book and the book is a world, and both are labyrinthine and enclose enigmas designed to be understood and participated in by man" (J. E. I. xix) Borges on Tlön: the narrator feels "dismay" because "his everyday world . . . ., his past . . . and the past of his forefathers. . . are slipping away." Thus, on one level, the "subject is not Uqbar or Orbis Tertius but rather a man who is being drowned in a new and overwhelming world that he can hardly make out" (qtd. in Irby "Borges" 102) "The twentieth- century dates cited in "Tlön, Uqbar" 1914, the 1930s, 1942) suggest a time of recognized crisis, a time of upheavals when people are cast adrift and, unable to accept their older beliefs, their history, or even their language, seek gratification (as is done on planet Tlön) in the amazing, the novel, and the bizarre. Tlön stands for the new ways of life that seize men's souls and violently sweep away the past. Far on the periphery of it all there lives a man of traditional culture who is skeptical of facile symmetries and fads but too old to swim against the inexorable tide. Out of his element in a changed world, he hides alone amidst his ancient books on ancient subjects, resigned to his isolation" (Bell-Villada 134) "Borges has stated on more than one occasion that his fantastic tales are essentially parables, veiled comments on real human problems. Thus, even when Borges depicts an unreality, he is alluding to reality indirectly by other means. Conversely, when Borges's fictions have recognizable, real settings, unreality somehow intrudes, disrupting Nature's laws or at least questioning them" (Bell-Villada 43) Bell-Villada, Gene. Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1981. Print. © 2000 David Bordelon
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